Japanís Anti-Piracy Laws Hurt Revenue

Well the Japanese new anti-piracy have been in effect for some time and the results are now in. According to this artical it doesnt look good for the music industry. What do you think and has anyone heard anything else similar concerning manga?

________________"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown"

Wow. The fact that people aren't supposed to pirate but do anyways, then if they like what they got they go buy the real deal is a silently agreed upon fact. While the government shouldn't condone the action, when they go and outright try to crush it they severely impact everything. I feel bad for the japs.

"Officially, this machine doesn't exist, you didn't get it from me, and I don't know you. Make sure it doesn't leave the building." Graphing Calculator StoryGods Must Be Strong, Godslayers Must be Stronger

This is why some companies try to give out free stuff, sell some products at costs and spend massive amount of money on ads => to make people want to consume more stuff. A law at makes people too afraid to consume stuff will hurt the economy so much that it would either force a change in consumption behaviour (e.g. people consume more alternative/foriegn product) or an out break of rebellion against the law or an economic recession.

Manga is thankfully unique in its position that only japan has it. It's very difficult to force people to stop reading manga because it doesn't really have any close substitution. However, web comics, game apps and other form of entertainment have been slowly killing the manga industry. If the law is enforced in such a way that people become afraid to share manga digitally then manga will slowly disappear on the digital market. Then it will shrink slowly as less and less people are interested in having paper books around. It will shrink slower than the newspaper market but faster than books.

Playing devil's advocate, but I want to point out that it was only Oct 1st that the punishment (2 million yen and up to two years in prison) came into effect. You can't get substantial data based off a single month. Also CDs in Japan are extremely expensive (~3000 yen) and sales has been declining for a long time anyways. That said, I have no doubt in my mind that the law has hurt the music industry there, but the extent of the damage done is unknown.

It probably does have a small impact, but not for the reasons the article is stating. People sometimes download to preview/review an album, judging if it's worth spending their money on a physical copy or high bitrate legal download. Money's tight everywhere and many people believe that they have the right to screen something before they pay for it.

But Japan already has one of the lowest piracy rates in the world (recent studies of pirated iOS and Android apps reinforce this), so I doubt the "popular" opinion is completely validated, seeing as the law was only passed a month ago. Their economy has been in freefall for years now, only made worse by the last big earthquake & tsunami, and more recently the public realization that their electronic and tech sectors are flirting with financial death. Also, even if you think the one month's worth of data is valid, you must consider that people generally tend to save up just before the New Year period, so it's not inconceivable that most consumers just spent less in that single month.